The Mirror and the Light

Brother Martin says, when you think of death, cast out fear. But perhaps that advice is easier to take if you expect to die in your bed, with a priest buzzing in your ear. Gardiner will press for heresy charges and burn him if he can. He knows about that: the green wood, the vagrant wind, and the dogs of London whimpering at the smell.

The king might grant the axe. That is the best he can hope for, unless. There is always unless. Erasmus says, ‘No man is to be despaired of, so long as the breath is in him.’

He signs off: Written with the quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner, this Saturday at your Tower of London.

He dries the ink. One cannot help but lie. His hand is not notably quaking. But it is true his heart is sorrowful. He sits with his hand to his chest, rubbing it a little. ‘Christophe,’ he says, ‘fetch in my supper. What am I having?’

‘Thank Christ! I thought you had lost your appetite. We have strawberries and cream. And the Italian merchants have sent you their sympathy and a cheese.’

The merchant Antonio Bonvisi used to send food to Thomas More, dishes fragrant with spice. But More would push them aside, and say to his servant, ‘John, can you find me a milk pudding?’

The Duke of Urbino, Federigo di Montefeltro, was asked what it took to rule a state. ‘Essere umano,’ he said: to be human. He wonders if Henry will reach the standard.

There is no reply to his letter. No direct reply, at least. Beginning early, in tender summer dawns, the interrogations proceed into the hot afternoons, when the broad light in the chamber grows dusty. Sometimes the sessions are quiet and industrious, sometimes they are more like exchanges of insults than any proceeding of state. Like Fitzwilliam, Call-Me cannot look at him. He says, ‘He did this,’ and ‘He did that,’ as if Thomas Essex were not in the room. When Gardiner graces them with his presence he is grave, dry, judicious, careful to suppress the bubbling anticipation he must feel.

The clerk Gwyn sneaks back a time or two. Norfolk does not notice him because a clerk is beneath his notice, unless he offends. The clerk entertains him – the prisoner – by sometimes casting up a glance to Heaven, or turning down his mouth in disbelief at what he must record. Till Riche bursts out, ‘I am not content with this clerk. He keeps looking at the prisoner.’

‘So do you keep looking at me,’ he says. ‘I am not content with you, Richard Riche. You speak as if I have been a traitor all the years you have known me. Where has your evidence been till now? Did it fall out through a hole in your pocket?’

Riche says, ‘It is no small thing, to indict a man so close to the king. I sought guidance. I prayed about it.’

‘And your prayers were answered?’

Riche says coldly, ‘Oh, yes.’

Once again Gwyn packs up his penknives and quills without demur, though not without a backward glance. Another clerk comes in and ahems over how to continue, until Norfolk snarls at him to start anywhere. In this way the hours pass, marked off by the bells from St Peter ad Vincula and from the city outside the walls. The questions never make more sense than they did on the first day, nor does the picture of his life ever reflect the reality as he sees it. The mirror presents an alien face, eyes askew, mouth gaping. Lord Montague, and Exeter, and Nicholas Carew suffered this estrangement from self; and Norris and George Boleyn before them. Montague had said, ‘The king never made a man but he destroyed him again.’ Why should Cromwell be an exception?

Florence made me, he thinks. London unmade me. In Florence the bell called Leone announces the dawn even to the blind. Then rings Podestà, then Popolo. At Terce, when the law courts open, Leone and Montarina summon litigants and advocates to their business.

When he was an infant, his sister Kat used to tell him the bells made the time. When the hour strikes, and the music shivers in the air, you have the best of it; and what’s left is like a sucked plumstone on the side of a plate.

Lord Audley shows his face: shifty, ashamed. I created you, Audley, he thinks. I promoted you above your deserts, to have a compliant chancellor: and you have grown rich. ‘I thought you were with me, my lord. You always posed as valiant for the gospel, but I think you were only valiant for my favour. You swore to be my friend for life.’ He adds, ‘I have it in writing.’

Fitzwilliam absents himself. Perhaps he has said to the king, I know Crumb is no traitor, I cannot do it?

‘He is busy,’ Wriothesley says.

Riche says, ‘He is appointed Lord Privy Seal in your place.’

Norfolk says, ‘There is more matter than your arrest, for trusted men to deal with. There are more men in this realm, than Cromwell.’